Several changes have been made to professions. The profession leveling cap has been increased to 525 skill, with the new skill rank of Illustrious Grand Master. New recipes have been added to all professions, and a new secondary skill has been added, Archaeology.

Tradeskills

Some tradeskill crafting recipes will now grant multiple skill-ups relative to the difficulty of the item. For example, the tailor-crafted Deathsilk Robe grants 3 skill points upon crafting!

Professions are no longer listed under your general tab in the spellbook but have moved to their own tab inside of the spellbook. Inside you will find all your professions, with progress bars for the skill level and any specializations if you have one. Each profession will have all of its relevant spells linked to it (e.g. Jewelcrafting will have Jewelcrafting and Prospecting). See it here!

Alchemy

Alchemists will be seeing a few major changes in Cataclysm, including a couple of crazy new recipes (like the Mysterious Potion or the Potion of Deepholm), a new transmutation system, and their very own mount!

Tailoring

Instead of specialization-specific cloths, Tailors will be able to create Dreams by combining 8 Stacks of Embersilk and 30 of any one of the Volatile elements. The element will determine the type of dream created (e.g. Volatile Fire is a reagent for Dreamcloth).

Other Skills

Archaeology

Archaeology is a brand new secondary profession introduced in Cataclysm. Similarly to the other secondary professions - Cooking, First Aid, and Fishing - it can be trained regardless of how many of the rest you have. As the name suggests, this new profession involves a lot of riding/flying around, digging, and searching for long-lost artifacts unearthed by Deathwing's reemergence. Here is how it works:

When you first train Archaeology, you are given the spell Survey. You also gain the ability to track dig sites on your world map - make a note here, not the minimap. Each one of the 4 continents will have 4 dig sites (marked with a little digging shovel icon) at any one time - and those sites will be randomly generated for every player, which should mitigate competition for resources and ganking to a minimum. In addition to that, every player can only dig in the dig sites marked for him or her - and the only way to get a new dig site to spawn is to exhaust an old one by unearthing all 3 fragments in it.

When you get to a dig site (zone maps also display those, by the way - as pretty visible red circular shapes), you need to start Survey-ing it. Every time you cast Survey, surveying equipment will spawn next to you - it consists of a spyglass-looking part, and a light. The (front lens of the) spyglass indicates the direction the closest fragment is to you, and the light indicates how close you are to it. Green means very close - within 30-40 yards of it; yellow is medium distance, and red is far away. If you cast Survey within about 10 yards of a fragment's location, you will unearth it and loot a few fragments of an artifact of one of the 10 races - determined by the type of dig site you are researching.

You need fragments to "Solve" artifacts. The first time you pick a fragment of a certain race, you are randomly assigned an artifact of appropriate level/tier from that race's "collection". Every artifact requires a different number of fragments, but the starting ones are around 30. When you get to that number, you can click the "Solve" button in your Archaeology window and turn the fragments into the artifact, which then appears in your inventory. Any leftover fragments are reassigned to the next artifact of that race.

There are two types of artifacts - common and rare. Common is the kind of stuff you will be getting almost all the time - relatively easy to solve, and rewarding only a gray item you can sell. Rare artifacts are the ones that actually give your character something - a pet, a mount, a weapon, and so on. Something worth mentioning about the weapons - they seem to be Bound to Account, but not in the way Heirlooms are. You will still be able to trade those between characters on your account, but they won't scale with level. So if you create some weapon for your 85 raiding character, and you no longer need it, your alts will be able to receive that item in the mail but won't be able to use it until they meet the level requirement for it.

Reforging

Reforging is a rather simple process that allows you to swap existing stats on an item for other stats the item does not currently have (some restrictions apply). Alliance players will need to visit Ithurian Whitespire in Stormwind near the Stockades, and Horde players can speak to Enchanter Farendin in The Drag. When you speak to the NPC, it asks you to drag and drop the item you want reforged. After dropping the item in the slot it asks which stat you would like to reduce and what you would like to increase.

You cannot reforge primary stats (with the exception of Spirit), and you can only add a stat if the item does not already have it (for example, you cannot remove Hit Rating to add Crit Rating to an item that already has Crit Rating). Also, you can only decrease / increase a statistic by the fixed conversion value presented.